Wind + Nuclear = Economical Hydrogen?
According to a report from Wired.com, engineers from Atomic Energy of Canada are pitching the idea of producing affordable hydrogen by combining the intermittent power provided by wind with the baseline power that would come from a nuclear plant.
“Using time-varying electricity price data from Ontario and Alberta,” the article states that the engineers ”calculate that their system can produce hydrogen at $2 per kilogram, easily meeting the U.S. Department of Energy’s goal of $2 to $3 per kilogram by 2015. One kilogram of hydrogen is considered equivalent to one gallon of gasoline.”
The article doesn’t explain this process well enough to pass judgement in my view. I think I’m going to e-mail one of these engineers and get a better explanation of their plan… I’ll keep you posted.
Tyler Hamilton is editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights magazine and a business columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the clean technology and green energy market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper.
November 13th, 2005 at 10:51 am
I find it very hard to believe that combining nuclear with anything can drive the cost down. Sure, it’s possible to reduce hydrogen prices with nukes — so long as they ignore the long run costs of nuclear waste. But with waste half lives in the range of thousands of years, nothing could be more expensive. No company can guarantee the secure disposal of toxic nuclear waste that will last longer than any human civilisation on the planet ever has.
November 13th, 2005 at 8:00 pm
The person you want to contact at AEC is Dr. Alistair Miller. He’s in the Office of the Principal Scientist if you want to call them up. I have a copy of one of his most recent presentations (Oct 18th).
I personally don’t believe in hydrogen as an energy currency but to each his own.